There’s lots of great software out there, and there’s no doubt some terrible stuff as well. Both groups usually have a couple of ugly heads in there though. The ones you just put down immediately. The ones you don’t even want anything to do with, ever. If you find out some cool program has been made by the same developer? Uninstall if you can do without it. Things just get that bad sometime.

To get back to Vuze (or Azureus, whatever name you know it by), it’s fucking disgusting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s got a lot of cool stuff, like that RSS reader that automatically downloads new torrents for you, but damn. I installed it, made one misclick, and without as much as a second warning I rebooted my Chrome. Hmm, weird. Went to look, it installed some shitty Amazon, Ebay and others plugins, and set my default search engine to Yahoo!. Why in the world would it ever need to do that? It’s a bittorrent client, for Christ’s sake!

Sometimes with shareware you can download a trial with whatever limitations the developer saw fit. Sure, that’s cool, at least I get to try before I buy. What definitely isn’t cool is when they keep shoving it in my face. “Only so many days of trial left!”, “You just started up a trial version, buy the real deal now!”, “You’re missing out on x and y!”. Screw that. I know I’m running a trial, a tiny little ribbon or whatever in the top-right will suffice. I don’t need a million alerts to tell me that.

And then there’s the idiots who manage to put ads into their applications. What were they even thinking? Yeah yeah, monetization, but I don’t want half my screen filled with bright flashing marketing puke. You’d be earning at least as much as the ads got you if you get rid of them, since you know, usability and friendliness of your UI and all?

Deep sigh. Luckily there’s still lots of great stuff out there to make up for this.
~ Fang

I’ve never really had much of a problem with Vuze. I mostly use it for streaming to my Xbox these days though. It’s great for that stuff and by far the best thing I’ve found to do that. I stick to uTorrent for torrenting. Normally when something is installing extra things and changing settings you can stop it doing that by checking what it’s actually doing. I don’t mind that so much. Full screen ads and everything annoy the heck out of me mind.